Benchmarking Your Presentations: Presentation Length and Features

Two of the most frequently asked questions are "how long is the typical presentation?" and "what features are the most commonly used?". Of the thousands and thousands of presentations created this year by customers, the average length is 11 minutes with 16 slides. This translates into 41 seconds of audio per slide which is close to Brainshark’s recommendation of no longer than 30 seconds. An exception to the rule might be a heavily animated or visually rich slide.

When you dig a little deeper, lengths of presentations vary per use case. Shorter presentations (less than 4 minutes) are typically marketing related, longer presentations (12+ minutes) are generally for training and those in-between can focus on product updates, benefits enrollment, and executive messaging. As the chart below indicates, the most popular presentation length is less than 4 minutes and frequency tapers down as the presentation length increases. Presentations longer than 18 minutes were combined into the same category on the end so you see a bump, but if you were to look at lengths in 4-6 minute increments, the frequency would continue to decline.

Almost every presentation uses at least one Brainshark feature, but which are the most popular? The prize goes to Attachments, which happens to be one of earliest features added to Brainshark. Looking a little deeper into the data, audio is heavily represented. Although the majority of presentations are still created using the telephone, adding audio with a microphone, uploading mp3 audio files, using background music, and enabling guests to add their voice to a presentation are heavily used features which speaks to the overall trend of customers creating more impactful content.

For a complete description and how-to of the 10 most popular features, view this presentation by Pat Kelly, Brainshark’s Director of Professional Services Operations & Solution Delivery: